Is MBR Included In Restore Of Single Partition?

Is it true that if you only back up and restore a single partition on a multi-partition drive that the MBR is not included in the restore? If this is true, is there a way to include the MBR in the restoration of a single partition? I think this is why my OS's will not boot after restoring a single partition.

Is it true that if you only back up and restore a single partition on a multi-partition drive that the MBR is not included in the restore? If this is true, is there a way to include the MBR in the restoration of a single partition? I think this is why my OS's will not boot after restoring a single partition.

Thanks in advance,
Roy

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There are a number of threads on this forum concerning this problem, if you do a search you will find that the MBR is NOT included if you image a single partition.

However I believe that support gave a link to a tool that will fix the MBR in one of the threads.

I ran into this problem recently when my drive became corrupted because of a power outage during a partition resize, because I had imaged separate partitions instead of the entire drive. However, I don't want to image the entire 160GB of the drive regularly - my practice is to keep the OS on its own partition and image that weekly, for a backup, since that's were stuff changes; I image the rest of the drive containing apps infrequently because that rarely changes; and I back up data on a data partition nightly, so I don't need to image that. I don't like incremental backups for reasons I won't go into here.

Would the following do as a workaround?

Let's say I'm building a new system.

I partition my drive (I typically have separate partitions for OS, programs, and data) I install my OS and True Image only, and image the entire drive. (The image is way small because it only the OS & trueimage are on the physical drive).

Then I do my complete install, and then image the separate partitions.

Now I get an HD crash, MBR is bad, and I have to restore everything.
First I restore the initial OS/ATI image, which fixes the corrupted MBR.
Then I restore my individual partition images, which overwrites the restored partitions and brings everything current.

First of all, I would like to mention that you may fix MBR either using your Windows Installation CD or using one of two tools described at Acronis Help Post.

As for imaging/restoring single partition, it is not guaranteed that you will be able to boot the disk after the restoration. Actually, all the data will be transferred in any way. Usually everything will be ok if you restore single partition to the same place where it was before, like in the scenario nolonemo proposed.

Now I get an HD crash, MBR is bad, and I have to restore everything.
First I restore the initial OS/ATI image, which fixes the corrupted MBR.
Then I restore my individual partition images, which overwrites the restored partitions and brings everything current.

Would this work?

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I do not see why it should not work. But why bother with the clean-image? All you need is little piece of paper with information about the size of your C,D,E partions for when you partition the new drive. Then, a clean install of the OS from the ordinary distribution CD to create all the necessary MBR and boot stuff. And you are ready to restore from the real backup image.

In my experience, solely with relatively uncomplicated systems (laptops and desktops with just a single physical HD, with the HD being split into two or more partitions but only one OS on the C: partition), I have found I don't need to worry about the whole "MBR thing" as long as I make the images from the boot CD rather than from within windows.

Starting with the images (made of single partitions, not the whole drive) on removable media (USB drive or DVDs), restoring to a bare metal never-partitioned-before drive works fine, restoring just a C: partition or adding further restored partitions for programs, data, whatever.

Where I have had problems is if I initialize the new drive and let my XP OS see the new drive / partitions before creating the original image. This is well documented elsewhere on the forum.

I do not see why it should not work. But why bother with the clean-image? All you need is little piece of paper with information about the size of your C,D,E partions for when you partition the new drive. Then, a clean install of the OS from the ordinary distribution CD to create all the necessary MBR and boot stuff. And you are ready to restore from the real backup image.

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If I did that, would the partitions on the new drive have to be exactly the same size as the old? Or only need to have enough space to hold the restores?